The phoenix

A poet, priest and womaniser, who ended his days as a grocer, he also wrote the words to some of the greatest operas. On the eve of Mozart's 250th anniversary, Anthony Holden looks at the colourful life of his librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte

Don Giovanni, one of the three Mozart operas written by librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, here staged by Opera North in 2005. Photograph: Tristram Kenton.
Tristram Kenton

On June 4 1805, a 56-year-old Italian immigrant disembarked in Philadelphia from the transatlantic packet Columbia, carrying only a violin. The little money on him when he left London, fleeing his many debtors, he had gambled away on the voyage. Before dying in New York 33 years later, in his 90th year, he would find new-world respectability as the first professor of Italian in America. For now, he set up shop as a grocer.

To those who knew him in the American denouement of his long European life, there was always an air of mystery about the Abbé Lorenzo da Ponte. A scholarly poet and teacher, he was also an ordained Catholic priest, rumoured to have been born Jewish. Although he had a devoted wife, he also had a reputation as a womaniser. With his flirtatious eyes and mane of white hair, Da Ponte charmed all he met. But his self-assurance also excited mistrust. When one of the first Italian operas was performed in New York in 1825, he had the nerve to claim he had written it. He had, so he said, known Mozart. Not to mention Casanova.

Was Lorenzo da Ponte even the professor's real name? Some begged leave to doubt it. Like the memoirs he had recently written, to pay off more debts, the old man was so full of tall stories ... The many lives of Lorenzo da Ponte - librettist of Mozart's three great operas, The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Cosi Fan Tutte - begin in Venice and hurtle eventfully across Europe before winding up in New York, where today he lies buried in the world's largest cemetery, beneath the flight path into JFK Airport.

Born in 1749, in the Venetian hill town of Ceneda (now Vittorio Veneto), his real name was Emanuele Conegliano, eldest son of a tanner. Uneducated, illiterate, he ran wild until he was 14, when his widowed father fell in love with a 16-year-old Christian girl. Before he could marry her, the family had to be received into the Catholic church. It being the custom for the eldest son to assume the name of the bishop who baptised them, Emanuele became Lorenzo da Ponte.

With Bishop da Ponte as his sponsor, the boy's fortunes took a turn for the better. He received a classical education, began to write poetry, and became a Catholic priest. Appointed a professor, he was soon disillusioned by academic in-fighting; at 24, he resigned to seek a new life in "the permanent fancy-dress ball that was Venice".

As the rest of Europe looked to its future via the ideas of Kant, Rousseau and Voltaire, once mighty Venice was partying its way towards becoming merely the most beautiful city on earth. As the French Revolution loomed, Venice's Robespierre was Casanova, the prototype libertine, soon to become Da Ponte's friend. But first, the Abbé had to make some conquests of his own. After numerous affairs, not least with married women, the poet-priest was banished from Venice. Wandering west across Europe, he arrived in Vienna in 1781 with a letter of introduction to the court composer, Antonio Salieri, who persuaded the emperor, Joseph II, to appoint Da Ponte his theatre-poet. Soon he made his name writing libretti for Salieri and other leading composers.

It was in 1783 that Da Ponte met the young, unemployed and impoverished composer from Salzburg. Mozart was thrilled to meet the eminent Abbé, six years his senior. "We have a new poet here, Abbé da Ponte," he wrote excitedly to his father in Salzburg.

In the wake of Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Mozart yearned to abandon the German tradition for Italian opera. "In opera, the poetry must be the obedient daughter of the music," he wrote. "The best thing is when a good composer, who understands the stage enough to make sound suggestions, meets an able poet, that true phoenix."

In Da Ponte, Mozart had met his "true phoenix". On the face of it, the pair were singularly ill-matched. Beneath his equally playful exterior, Mozart hid an essential seriousness Da Ponte lacked. Most of Da Ponte's life so far had been play; all of Mozart's had been work. By the time the illiterate 14-year-old Da Ponte had been received into the Catholic church, the seven-year-old Mozart was already giving concerts, winning awards and writing early masterpieces.

How ironic, in the light of their respective talents and posthumous reputations, that the struggling Viennese Mozart should have been so thrilled to find his "able poet" in the wayward but much better-known Abbé da Ponte. From such less than kindred spirits, perhaps, are the greatest artistic partnerships formed. The works that each wrote with others fall far short of the standards of the three works they wrote together, which have stood the test of time as mighty operatic masterpieces. And Da Ponte's poetic skill and theatrical instincts made an indispensable contribution. Without his "able poet", Mozart might not have reached the full heights of which he was capable, in the genre that meant most to him.

Despite Mozart's success with Die Entführung, the emperor's sole response had been: "Too fine for our ears; and too many notes, my dear Mozart, too many notes!" - to which the composer's sardonic reply had been: "Just as many notes, Your Majesty, as are necessary."

Joseph preferred the less complex music of Salieri, Paisiello and Martin y Soler, telling the director of his court theatre, Count Orsini de Rosenberg, that "Mozart's music is much too difficult to sing". Mozart may not have known of this, but he did know that he had to write Italian opera to stand a chance of popular success in Vienna.

The Italian composer Paisiello had recently enjoyed a huge success with an opera of Beaumarchais's play The Barber of Seville. Now Mozart persuaded Da Ponte to make a libretto from its sequel, The Marriage of Figaro. The emperor had banned the play as "subversive", so they were obliged to work in secret. By November 1785 Da Ponte had delivered a draft to Mozart, who wrote the music in six weeks. Not until then did the court poet inform the emperor what he and Mozart had been up to. When Joseph sternly reminded his poet that the play was banned, Da Ponte assured him that the process of converting it into an opera had obliged him to shorten the piece - removing the political content in those scenes that might give offence. "As to the music," he added, "it is remarkably beautiful." Once Joseph had discovered this for himself, he sanctioned Figaro for performance.

It was with this work that opera would come of age. When Da Ponte was born, Handel reigned supreme; four years after his death, Wagner would make his debut. Da Ponte and Mozart were the twin pillars of that crucial transition, transforming opera into an art form exploring central human issues in a potent, accessible but above all realistic manner, via characters the audience could recognise, and with whom they could identify.

Opera buffa was Da Ponte's speciality, Mozart's aspiration. Popular in Vienna because it encapsulated bourgeois taste rather than aristocratic pretension, it portrayed people from everyday life rather than abstract ideals - the man or woman familiar from the family or the street rather than gods, heroes or classical archetypes. With different characters of whatever social status sharing similar views and aspirations, opera buffa reflected the Enlightenment ideal of the similarity of all human beings, regardless of birth or rank. As yet, however, it was regarded by the cognoscenti as an inferior form to seria.

This was soon to be shown up as mere snobbery. But Figaro enjoyed only nine performances in Vienna before being dropped from the repertoire. In the second Habsburg city of Prague, however, it proved a triumph - so much so that Mozart was commissioned to write another opera, for which Da Ponte suggested a reworking of the old Don Juan legend. As he set to work on Don Giovanni for Mozart, Da Ponte was also writing libretti for Salieri and Martin y Soler. "You won't succeed!" laughed the emperor. "Perhaps not, but I shall try," he insisted. "In the morning I shall write for Martin, in the evening for Salieri, and by night for Mozart."

Settling down to his tasks with a bottle of Tokay to his right, an inkstand in the middle, and a box of Seville tobacco to his left, he was further distracted by the serving girl, his landlady's daughter, briefed to supply his every need - including some her mother had not bargained for. In two months, nonetheless, Da Ponte delivered his manuscript to Mozart, who set it to music in time for a triumphant Prague premiere on October 29 1787. Again, the piece failed in Vienna, where the emperor told Mozart: "The opera is divine, but it's not food for the teeth of my Viennese."

"We'll give them time to chew it," was Mozart's answer. But the end of the 1788 season saw the emperor close down the opera - costly and inappropriate while the nation was at war with the Turks. Faced with ruin, Da Ponte hatched a plan to keep it going at no cost to the emperor - who himself commissioned their third collaboration, Cosi Fan Tutte, one of only two original works among Da Ponte's 50-plus libretti. The role of Fiordiligi was written for his latest mistress, a singer called Adriana del Bene, better-known as La Ferrarese.

Joseph II never saw the opera he had commissioned. By its first night, he already lay dying. As Da Ponte composed an ode in his memory, jealous enemies at court were busy persuading the new emperor, Leopold II, that his poet had been plotting against him. Soon he found himself forbidden entry to the Imperial Theatre, to see one of his own operas. Within days, as he had been from Venice 10 years before, Da Ponte was banished from Vienna. Kicking his heels in Trieste, he met a beautiful English-born girl named Nancy Grahl, whom he promptly married - to the astonishment of all who knew him. Via a visit to his friend Casanova in Bohemia, the couple headed for Paris. In Da Ponte's pocket was a letter of introduction to Marie-Antoinette from her late brother, Joseph.

Casanova saw Da Ponte off with some memorable advice: "Don't go to Paris, go to London. Once there, never visit the Cafe degl'Italiani, and never sign your name." When Da Ponte heard of Marie-Antoinette's imprisonment, he took Casanova's advice and headed for London. Here, for the next decade, he was poet to the King's Theatre, Haymarket, now (as Her Majesty's) home to Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera, then dedicated to Italian opera. But the gullible Da Ponte fell foul of the theatre's roguish manager, William Taylor, ignoring Casanova's advice by signing his name to some business documents. As the scale of Taylor's mismanagement became clear, Da Ponte was arrested and imprisoned 30 times in three months.

Unable to support his wife and children, he put them on a boat to America, where Nancy had relatives. After nine more wretched months in London, he was warned that he again faced arrest for debt. This time Da Ponte decided to run for it. He did a midnight flit to Gravesend, where he boarded the Columbia for Philadelphia.

The rest of his life would be spent in the young United States. After that false start as a grocer, Da Ponte found work as a teacher of Italian, founding the Manhattan Academy for Young Gentlemen. Prospering at last, he made it his personal mission to infuse the new world with a love and knowledge of Italian culture, particularly music and literature. After a diversion to Pennsylvania, where he ran a millinery and a distillery, he returned to New York to become the first professor of Italian in the United States, at Columbia College (now University), in 1825.

Running a bookshop on the side, Da Ponte presented Columbia and the New York Public Library with volumes of Italian literature that form the nucleus of their collections to this day. In 1828, as he neared 80, he also brought the first Italian opera company to America, not least for a performance of "his" Don Giovanni. In his last decade, he built and ran America's first opera house in Greenwich Village.

On 17 August 1838, five months before his 90th birthday, Da Ponte died amid his large American family. His original burial place, New York's Roman Catholic cemetery, was subsumed in 1903 into the Calvary Cemetery in Queen's. Da Ponte's remains were lost in the process, but a tombstone was finally erected in 1987 beneath the jets roaring into JFK.

Da Ponte had proved an archetype of the ideal American immigrant, contributing as much to his adopted homeland as it had offered him. But his name will live on as that of Mozart's librettist - and his poetry will be heard in opera houses all over the world, every night of every year, for as long as the civilised world turns.

· Anthony Holden's biography of Lorenzo Da Ponte, The Man Who Wrote Mozart, will be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson for £18.99 on January 26, the day before the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth